I updated the forum last night. Today I will be moving Textkit to a new platform under wordpress. After there move, there will still be plenty of big changes and work to be done, so if you see something you don't like - let me know because I'll be listening and there's more work to be done.

Last night, I did some reading on forums with this simple question in mind, 'how to make forums easier to use?' If you have thoughts on that, please share. I do no that I'll be condensing some of the boards that are not used too much and I''ll be working with rss feeds to better bring out out both new and active threads across textkit.

I think it would be nice if we had a font that was more Unicode-compliant.

When we type in Greek, the diacritical marks are not supported by the current font, and they are chosen from another font to substitute. It makes the text really unattractive - plus the look of the letter chi (χ) is unattractive altogether. Could you use a more universal font? That would be fantastic!!

Currently, the stylesheet is set to use Trebuchet MS as the basic font, and after that it searches for Greek polytonic replacements in the font Arial (which in its most recent releases supports Unicode very nicely). If you switched Trebuchet MS to Verdana, at least that would correct the chi problem, but it will still search for polytonics in Arial. If you just switched to Arial, it would be uglier, but it would be Unicode-ready. What do you think?

So, is there any way that you could just add a [font] tag to the forum? It would at least be nice to be able to change the font to Gentium or at least Palatino Linotype to represent the Greek text better.

By the way, I tried to download one of the texts, and it requested that I sign into WordPress. I didn't have a WordPress login, so I registered. It said that it would send me an e-mail, but it never did. I then went to request a fresh password, and it gave me an error. Do you know if it's working correctly?

[edit] Hmmmm.... I dunno, looks OK to me on Windows Vista Home Premium/IE 8. I would like a built-in Greek keyboard popup or something, though.

The non-diacritic characters are displayed in the font Verdana, while the polytonic characters are displayed in the font Arial. Do you not see that these are distinct fonts in the display? On my screen, the polytonic characters are bigger than the non-polytonic ones. Additionally, for whatever reason, the χ (chi) in the font Verdana does not even descended below the lower line. It's just odd.

Of course the whole thing displays as sans-serif polytonic Greek. Do you see a difference in the size of these two epsilons? εἐ - For me, the epsilon with the smooth breathing is a bit taller than the one without. It's the same with all of the diacritical characters.

This is why I think a font that has full Latin and Greek support (like Gentium) would be advisable for the main font. It could be embedded with the stylesheet even.

At least having a tag that would allow Greek text to take on a single polytonics-supporting font would be really welcome. It could be labelled [el] or [gr], but something like that would be nice.

(I have a [gr] tag that I created on my forums, and it works very nicely to easily set off Greek text. I use GFS Porson as the main font.)

Tahoma as well works okay with polytonic Greek, if everyone likes the look of it. But I'd love it if a beautiful serif font(such as Palatino Linotype, Gentium, or GFS Porson, etc.) is supported for Greek.

mingshey wrote:Tahoma as well works okay with polytonic Greek, if everyone likes the look of it. But I'd love it if a beautiful serif font(such as Palatino Linotype, Gentium, or GFS Porson, etc.) is supported for Greek.

I do see a small difference between the size of the vowels with and without diacritical marks, and the chi does not extend below the baseline. But it still seems readable enough to me. Maybe not optimal, but not a showstopper. Certainly better than the fonts in some textbooks I have seen.

However, for whatever reason, the Greek in my post looks different to me than the same text in the quote block in your responding post. The diacritical marks appear to be "squished up" against the letters in your post. That is odd, and somewhat more annoying, I must confess.

The problem with fonts such as Gentium, though, is that they are not standard with some operating systems, e.g. Windows 7 (at least according to a Windows 7 font list I just Googled). So machines without Gentium would have to fall back on more standard fonts anyway. And if they can't, this could confuse and turn off potential new textkittens. Also, since Jeff is concerned about making Textkit better for users of non-traditional browsing devices (pads and phones), that raises the question of what fonts are supported on these?

Anyway, all these suggestions about how Textkit should be remind me of Aesop's fable of the miller and the donkey. I am just grateful to Jeff for all the hard work involved, and am willing to live with minor imperfections.

I, Lex Llama, super genius, will one day rule this planet! And then you'll rue the day you messed with me, you damned dirty apes!

I have been monitoring this thread and I WILL make some suggested changes. I can't say exactly when just yet, but I just wanted to let everyone in this thread know that your comments have not gone unnoticed.

Just a quick update to say that I migrated Textkit to a new server today. Everything appears to be running normal. If you spot any problems that you think I should know about - please contact me via the form or email me directly to jeff AT pre23 DOT com